This startup raised $21 million to clean up the AI agent mess hitting companies

Opsin cofounders Jeremy Mailen, James Pham, and Oz Wasserman.

Christopher Denise/Opsin Opsin raised $21 million to monitor and govern the AI agents companies are using.

The startup hopes to complement the agent boom brought by OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and others.

In the red-hot cybersecurity space, Opsin is scaling up its sales and engineering ranks.

AI agents are starting to outnumber humans in many high-tech workplaces, and they can be far trickier to monitor.

Opsin, an AI security and governance startup, announced Thursday it raised $21 million to meet the moment.

As employees across the corporate world plug AI agents from the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft into more of their work, the company is helping to wrangle the new crop of potentially risky interlopers .

It's never been easier for non-technical workers to deploy agents — autonomous software built on AI that can complete tasks.

As employees pump the software into their companies' work, code, and databases, they can lose sight of what the AI is actually doing.

When Opsin's CEO and cofounder, James Pham, realized security fears were slowing down AI use, he decided it was time to scale up his company, he told Business Insider.

"Agents are actually more similar to humans than you think," Pham said.

"And the reason is because you don't understand what is going on in a human head, but you can judge them by their actions." Opsin aims to provide a comprehensive view of what AI agents are actually doing within an organization and the risks that behavior might pose.

SYN Ventures and Race Capital led the roughly 20-person company's new funding round, which will go toward expanding its sales and engineering teams.

Security pros need to clean up a mess of AI agents Pham, an MIT alum, and one of his cofounders, Oz Wasserman, met at the firm Abnormal Security and each left in 2022.